Andrew Fuyarchuk
Yorkville University, Fredericton, Canada ORCID: 0000-0002-3681-1396
e-mail: andrew.fuyarchuk@mail.utoronto.ca
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12775/RF.2020.054
Revitalizing Western Metaphysics
with Hermeneutics: Reading Gadamer
in Light of Fundamental Themes
in Chung-ying Cheng
I. Introduction
When Being is identified with an unchanging realm transcendent to beings, then the conditions are in place for a rift between the thinking subject and object.1 According to Chung-ying Cheng, the polarization
of mind and body, reason and emotions, knower and known has been an ineradicable feature of the history of western thought. He explains that even movements such as logical positivism, pragmatism, phenom-enology and hermeneutics that have aimed to overthrow metaphysics have re-instigated the dichotomies.2 He argues that deconstructions by
1 I am relying on the authority of Heidegger’s interpretation of subject-object
di-chotomy, Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth”, in: Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings:
from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell (New
York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1977), 133–188. My sincere thanks to the following reviewers for their comments and recommendations: Professors Bin Song, Phil Rose, and Mansi Handa.
2 Chung-ying Cheng, “Onto-Hermeneutical Vision and the Analytic Discourse:
Interpretation and Reconstruction in Chinese Philosophy”, in: Two Roads to Wisdom?
Chinese and Analytic Philosophical Traditions, ed. Bo Mou (Peru: Open Court Publishing
Company, 2001), 96.
Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida and Rorty bear the imprint of western tech-nology and science.3 In response, he positions the Yijing’s immanentist
metaphysics in a creative, transformative and ameliorative relationship with western philosophy; specifically the legacy of 17th century
Carte-sianism. This creative deployment of his insights aims to show how foundations need not amount to foundationalism. For this reason, the renaissance of Neo-Confucianism by way of Cheng ought to be heeded by philosophers concerned with the future of metaphysics in Western society.
Through the Journal of Chinese Philosophy, the International Society of Chinese Philosophy, international conferences, and teaching, Cheng has been building East-West cross-cultural understandings for roughly forty-six years.4 While he has identified Alfred North Whitehead’s
pro-cess philosophy as having the strongest affinities with Neo-Confucian dialectic of constancy in change,5 this has not been extended to
Gadam-er. In general, Cheng does not recognize how Gadamer’s hermeneutics goes beyond a temporally mediated and thus linguistic interpretation of texts, history, art and philosophy.6 On-cho Ng is an exception. He
initiated a rapprochement between Gadamer and Cheng that argues for an ontological foundation in hermeneutics, without however giv-ing due regard to the question of human ethos or human disposition toward beings.7 He has also retracted this endeavor. For the most part,
scholars believe that in contrast to Cheng, who gives primacy of place to the trans-historical foundations in determining the truth of an in-terpretation, Gadamer’s “historically-effected consciousness” ensures that those foundations are eclipsed.8
3 Chung-ying Cheng, “On Entering the 21st Century: My Philosophical Vision
and My Philosophical Practice”, in: The Imperative of Understanding: Chinese
Philoso-phy, Comparative PhilosoPhiloso-phy, and Onto-Generative Hermeneutics, ed. On-cho Ng (New
York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2008), 15.
4 Consulting Eric Nelson, “Chung-ying Cheng: Creativity, Onto-Generative
Hermeneutics, and the Yijing”, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 43/1–2 (March–June 2016): 125.
5 Chung-ying Cheng. “Categories of Creativity in Whitehead and
neo-Confu-cianism”, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 6/3 (1979): 251–274.
6 Cheng, “On Entering the 21st Century”, 18.
7 On-cho Ng, “Negotiating the Boundary between Hermeneutics and
Philoso-phy in Early Ch-ing Ch’eng-Chu Confucianism: Li Kuangti’s (1642–1718) Study of the Doctrine of the Mean (Chung-ying) and Great Learning (Ta-hsuen)”, in: Imagining
Boundaries: Changing Confucian Doctrines, Texts and Hermeneutics, ed. Kai-wing Chow
et. al. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 165–193.
8 On-Cho Ng, “Toward a Hermeneutic Turn in Chinese Philosophy: Western
Theory, Confucian Tradition, and Cheng Chung-ying’s Onto-Hermeneutics”, Dao:
However, there is another side to Gadamer’s hermeneutics than history – the numerological cosmology of the Pythagorean Plato mir-rored in the microcosmic scale of life. When this side of his herme-neutics is clarified with due regard to contemporary scholarship on Gadamer, then the role of Being in his hermeneutics falls within the scope of Cheng’s immantentist metaphysics of the Yijing tradition. This in turn is a catalyst for re-interpreting Western metaphysics and self-understanding. Toward that end, first, the affinities between Ga-damer the Pythagorean Platonist and Cheng the Neo-Confucian on Being and human existence are outlined. Second, the extent to which reasoning of American continental Gadamer scholars Daniel Tate and James Risser is influenced by the logic of the western mind is scruti-nized. A selective representation of their writing about Gadamer ex-hibits a tendency to privilege one prong of his dialectic. This indicates reticence toward dwelling or lingering in the middle of contesting forces, which for both Cheng and Gadamer is a catalyst for harmo-nizing those forces. The final step builds on arguments by Gadamer scholars such as Jean Grondin, Walter Lammi and Andrzej Wierciński. In contrast to the American continentalists, they call on dispositional recollection of a prior ground of existence discernable in the tradition of philosophy. For this reason, they stand behind transhistorical foun-dations in hermeneutics. This moves their thought toward the middle within the tension of existence and thereby enables them to enact a di-alectical theory of Being in their interpretation of Gadamer that reso-nates with Cheng on human nature and creativity. At the same time, by limiting recollection to an historical tradition that recovers either a Greek philosophical or Christian theological worldview rather than the eternal cycles of nature they overlook how, for Gadamer, language includes a reciprocity of rhythm that has a share in the self-unfolding structure characteristic of all living beings.
II. Cheng and Gadamer
Cheng constructively ameliorates the moral, psychological, political, and epistemological consequences of the western subject-object dichotomy with an immanentist metaphysics. Contra the western logic of either/or in which opposites exclude each other, he employs “the inclusive logic of ‘both/and’.” This derives, in part, from the Chinese language. Accord-ing to Jesse FlemmAccord-ing, that language is not constrained by a grammar that contracts meaning into an abstract definition or concept. Instead,
a Fusion of Horizons – Gadamer, Quine, and Chung-ying Cheng”, Journal of Chinese
modern spoken Mandarin uses phrases that invite an inter-relationality of meanings.9 In this way, the knower cannot be anchored in a position
over and against a given object. Any pretense toward a “god’s eye point of view” is removed. In its place, the knower and the thing known are continually transformed. This follows from the primacy of place Cheng gives to comprehensive observation (guan). It consists of both attentive-ness to “germinating seeds or nodes of change,” but also feeling response and reciprocity.10 Being attentive and watchful includes relationality.
Cheng’s mending the divide in western culture also depends on his notion of the human person. According to Cheng’s Neo-Confucian renewal of the yin-yang cosmology,11 human nature, including
under-standing and interpretation, participates fully in the cosmic order de-fined by Heaven and Earth. The human person is the locus for their har-monization, which is expressed in political, moral and social action. As a result of feeling the tension in existence, we cannot avoid feeling the demand to harmonize those forces within a given situation. This is the thought that underlines Cheng’s assertion: “There is a potential unity of man and heaven via human nature, and through this potential unity and hence through development of one’s nature (and hence develop-ment of natures of others and things) one can attain the highest form of development to harmony of all things.”12 Clearly, there are
implica-tions of existing rationally within the ontological order of reality for “environmental hermeneutics” that are beyond the scope of this paper.13
Suffice it to say that in contrast to the binary logic of the Western mind that pits reason against the emotions, the Neo-Confucian unity of heart-mind/feeling-comprehensive observation is the channel through which the overarching structure of reality is fulfilled in every facet of life.14
In contrast to Western dualism of Being and non-being that justifies an irrational rage against nature and reduced it to standing reserve; by as-suming that natural and human events are inseparable and mutually
9 Jesse Flemming, “The Onto-Hermeneutics of Guan”, in: The Imperative of
Under-standing: Chinese Philosophy, Comparative Philosophy, and Onto-Generative Hermeneutics,
ed. On-cho Ng (New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2008), 76–77.
10 Ibidem, 90–91.
11 They are forces of nature (female, shade and male, light) discernible in the
structure of society, government, architecture, biology, and metaphysics. Chung-ying Cheng, “On Harmony as Transformation: Paradigms from the I-Ching”, Journal
of Chinese Philosophy 16/2 (June 1989): 140.
12 Chung-ying Cheng, “Confucian Onto-Hermeneutics: Morality and Ontology”,
Journal of Chinese Philosophy 27/1 (March 2000): 51. For Cheng’s view of the unity
of human beings and nature and the cosmos see Höchsmann, “Foreseeing a Fusion of Horizons”: 140.
13 See Nelson, “Chung-ying Cheng: Creativity, Onto-Generative Hermeneutics,
and the Yijing”, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 43/1–2 (March–June 2016): Note 33, 134.
shaping aspects;15 by thinking of the self between heaven and earth;
on-to-generative hermeneuts feel the need to remove the contradiction be-tween competing forces and, thereby, creatively transform discord and conflict in the world into harmonious relations.16
Before comparing Gadamer to Cheng, it is important to answer an objection from Richard Palmer. He argues that in Truth and Method, hermeneutics is based largely on Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity. Palmer limits Plato to Part III and associates him with light, intelligibil-ity, the beautiful, the good and the true rather than with Gadamer’s way of interpreting art, history, and philosophy. However, we cannot be sure that this is the last word on the question. It is telling that Palmer does not refer to Plato’s ontology in Part III except indirectly since it is implicated in notions of the Beautiful and the Good.17 To my knowledge,
Chris-topher Dawson was among the first to address the question of Plato’s ontology in relation to Truth and Method Part I. He writes:
The intention of the conceptual analysis under consideration is, for all that, concerned not with the theory of art, but with ontology. The cri-tique of traditional aesthetics, which it has in view for the moment, is only a passage for it towards acquiring a horizon that jointly encloses both art and history.18
According to Dawson, Gadamer’s aesthetics, as well as his appro-priation of the tradition in Truth and Method, ought to be interpreted considering Plato’s ontology of the Good and the Beautiful in Part III. The beautiful in Plato is characterized by a transformation into struc-ture and thus self-presentation prefigured in Gadamer’s study of natural processes of which play is a variation, in Part I. Taking up what has been concluded about the One and the many, this entails that the contradic-tion between thought and language, subject and object, copy and origi-nal is removed in the course of following the topic that announces itself in a unity of thought and Being (thereby transforming copy into mirror relation, i.e., double mimesis).19 This is a synopsis of the transformative
15 Roger T. Ames, “The Great Commentary (Dazhuan) and Chinese natural
cos-mology”, International Communication of Chinese Culture 2/1 (2015): 1.
16 Cheng, “Confucian Onto-Hermeneutics”: 51.
17 Richard Palmer, “Gadamer’s Late ‘Turn:’ From Heideggerian Ontology to
a Philosophical Hermeneutics based on Anthropology”, in: The Imperative of
Under-standing: Chinese Philosophy, Comparative Philosophy, and Onto-Generative Hermeneutics,
ed. On-cho Ng (New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2008), 29, 40.
18 Christopher Dawson, “Gadamer’s Ontology: an Examination of Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s Concept of Being in Relation to Heidegger, Plato and Hegel” (Ph.D. diss., University of Lugano, 1996), 23. DOI: 10.17863/CAM.6696.
19 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, transl. revised 2nd ed. Joel
experience of truth that maps onto the dialectic of contesting forces turning into one another (conversion).
Dawson discloses another important insight. He explains that the experience of truth in art and in the appropriation of the tradition “is responsible for orienting us within the world of significance we inhabit.”20 The integration of the Pythagorean metaphysical order into
the experience of art and dialogue with a tradition presupposes cul-ture. Indeed, Gadamer’s account of Bildung is replete with references to harmony, proportion, form and expansive radii of inquiry compa-rable to the aim of Plato’s education for the guardians.21 The very unity
of Gadamer’s magnum opus depends on a concept of self-formation that foresees the beginning in the end. Truth and Method is not an excep-tion to the rule but, instead, attests to the extent to which Gadamer’s Platonic ontology, although in synchronicity with Confucian dialectic of harmonization informs his method of interpretation.
Having established that Plato’s ontology accounts for the unity of Truth and Method, the comparison between Gadamer and Cheng can proceed based on (1) dialectical theory of Being and (2) disposition or ethos. With respect to the first, Cheng defines the Neo-Confucian doctrine of harmonization: “For any two distinctive coexisting or suc-ceeding forces, processes, or entities, if there is mutual complementa-tion and mutual support between the two, so that each depends on the other for strength, actuality, productivity, and value, then we can say that these two form one harmonious whole and an organic unity.”22
In this theory of Being, contesting forces blend into one another and be-come mutually supportive while retaining their difference. This insight into the nature of reality is not unique to the Neo-Confucian tradition as understood by Cheng. He views both Confucianism and Daoism as an extension and development of the Yijing.23 Hence, there are grounds
for consulting Laozi, part 42 for a numerological articulation of Cheng’s doctrine, which is important for building common ground with Ga-damer.
The Tao produced One, One produced Two,
20 Dawson, “Gadamer’s Ontology”, 23.
21 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 9–16. See also Gadamer, “Plato and
the Poets”, in: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical
Stud-ies on Plato, transl. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 54.
22 Chung-ying Cheng, “Toward Constructing a Dialectics of Harmonization:
Harmony and Conflict in Chinese Philosophy”, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 33/s1 (December 2006), 27.
Two produced Three, Three produced All things.24
There are disputes about the interpretation of the passage that can-not be addressed.25 Flemming argues that Gadamer and Cheng’s way
of thinking about language converges on Tao. He explains that, for Cheng, Tao refers to the “background silence” which makes all forms of communication possible. Similarly, for Gadamer the “infinite unsaid” makes it possible for language to have meaning.26 This is a viable
inter-pretation. But the passage from Laozi goes a step further in that Tao is also a universal interplay of opposites that unfolds in history, culture, and human practices (generation of the world). In this case, the arith-metical formulation of Tao articulates the complementarity between dis-tinctly different elements in Cheng’s doctrine of harmonization. Indeed, it is for this reason, the contrast and complementarity of the one and the many that he considers Whitehead a western philosopher most akin to his own philosophy. The One and the many is also fundamental to Ga-damer.27
Elsewhere, I explain how the One and the many inform and clari-fy Gadamer’s philosophy.28 They are derived from Plato’s “unwritten
doctrine,”29 which is prefigured in Heraclitus and discussed below. Like
Tao and contra the Western tradition of metaphysics as Platonism advo-cated by Heidegger, Gadamer’s Platonic theory is numerological with-out being abstract and thus preserves the motility inherent to the self-unfolding one in Taoism: Although not a number, One logically entails
24 Gu zu-zhao, “The Global Contributions of Ancient Chinese
Philosophy-Aes-thetics”, Journal of Literature and Art Studies 6/6 (June 2016): 658.
25 I rely Xunwu Chen’s concise summary of Tao in, “A Rethinking of Confucian
Rationality”, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 25/4 (December 1998): 105–107. For analy-sis of the commonalities and controversies among different interpretations based on various sources see Franklin Perkins, “The Laozi and the Cosmogonic Turn in Classi-cal Chinese Philosophy”, Frontiers of Philosophy in China 11/2 (2016): 185–205.
26 Flemming, “The Onto-Hermeneutics of Guan,” 82.
27 Whitehead’s discovery of the One and many in Plato predates Gadamer’s
dis-covery of the same; an insight he attributes to Jacob Klein.
28 Andrew Fuyarchuk, “Gadamer’s Linguistic Turn Revisited in Dialogue with
Chung-ying Cheng’s Onto-Generative Hermeneutics”, Journal of Chinese Philosophy (June 2019). https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6253.12354. Also forthcoming by author, “Gadamer and the Nature of Language: Hermeneutics and Chinese Aesthetics in the Tradition of the Yijing”, Journal of Chinese Philosophy.
29 Gadamer mentions the doctrine in the conclusion to his 1942 “Plato’s
Educa-tional State” and develops it in 1968, “Plato’s Unwritten Doctrine.” Both are pub-lished in Dialogue and Dialectic, transl. P. Christopher Smith. Gadamer credits Jacob Klein for alerting him to the doctrine in the 1930’s. For a concise statement of the doc-trine see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Plato (1976)”, in: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heidegger
Many or two, which is also three (One in many) and simultaneously one (many in One by reason of an inversion).30 Thus understood, the
monism of traditional metaphysics beyond passive sense impressions is presupposed. However, if thought never transcended this non-relation, then Being could not reveal itself in beings without self-negation. There is thus a positive force within the annulment of separation that harbors a potential for unity;31 a logical contrast that includes mutual support
in which human nature has a share.
With respect to human nature, as mentioned above, Cheng believes that humans participate fully in the unity of Heaven and Earth through creative acts of harmonization. For this to transpire, mind or thinking must be an element of Being. Cheng explains, “I believe that we can con-struct some plausible framework of such a sort, such that the mind would emerge from organic matter, values would emerge from the mind, and organic matter would emerge from the process-reality of the ultimate.”32
Cheng is alluding to Whitehead and bio-chemistry, but the theological insinuation is not warranted in this context. Cheng aims to embed think-ing, knowledge and the human person in a concept of nature where the barriers between the internal mind and external reality have been re-moved. Toward that end, he envisions the person within the cosmos. Yet he also leaves the relation of mind to nature as understood by science undefined. The same cannot be said of Gadamer.
Contra modern science whose mathematical theories separate thought from reality and thereby justify technological rampage against nature, Gadamer aims to introduce a limit by way of the Greek unity of thought and Being. The first steps have already been taken. The New-tonian worldview cannot account for discoveries of electro-dynamics and biochemistry (“living, growing nature”).33 This shortcoming, he
suggests, has made science aware of its own historical conditions. This is evident in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. There are, therefore, historical conditions available to us with which to surpass the influence of Newtonian-Cartesian mechanization of the world pic-ture. There are historical conditions available for us to recreate that are
30 Compare to Georg Gadamer, “Hegel’s ‘Inverted World’”, in:
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, transl. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 44. Thereat he refers to the inversion of Plato’s two-fold world that stands behind the transformation of a copy into a mir-ror of Being.
31 A force of electricity distinguishes within itself a positive and negative. “Thus
the truth of the play of forces is the unitary lawfulness of reality, the law of appear-ance.” Ibidem, 43
32 Cheng, “On Entering the 21st Century”, 15–16.
33 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Natural Science and the Concept of Nature”, in:
not completely obscured by classical mechanics. Werner Heisenberg’s comparison of modern physics and ancient science attests to this. He writes, “We may remark that modern physics is in some way extremely near to the doctrines of Heraclitos. If we replace the word ‘fire’ by the word ‘energy’ we can almost repeat his statements word for word from our modern point of view. Energy is in fact the substance from which all elementary particles, all atoms and therefore all things are made, and en-ergy is that which moves.”34 Gadamer alters us to the same affinity in the
first two essays in The Beginning of Knowledge. They are both about the Heraclitean “Lightening steers all.” The early Greek intuition about real-ity that for Gadamer resurfaced in the 19th century as a criticism of
sub-stance metaphysics, e.g., in biochemistry and electrodynamics, suggests that the historical conditions for reviving the unity of thought and reality has returned.
Not unlike the pre-Socratic unity discernable in Heraclitos and Pla-to’s dialectic of One and many, quantum theory weaves together the stream of conscious experience with descriptions of the physical world.35
However, the theory is also limited. Mathematical descriptions cannot represent transformation in modes of perception required to cement the unity of mind and nature in the world. Gadamer returns to the early Greeks in this regard and discovers that in contrast to the moderns, they were not aware of “self-consciousness,” i.e., god’s eye point of view, but rather were concerned with “consciousness of” reality.36 The latter was
disclosed to them in a “new kind of objectivity” (objective-subjectivi-ty) says Richard Palmer, through “aesthetic vision”37 or “intuitive form
of unity.”38 Both are comparable to Cheng’s notion of comprehensive
observation (guan). These modes of perception are attentive and alert to a holistic sense of reality, a sense of the “All” discernable in the ear-ly Greeks for Gadamer. Like comprehensive observation that includes feeling-response and reciprocity (ganying), “aesthetic vision” is not only noetic precisely because the aesthetic presupposes an auditory dispos-ition toward beings typical of the Greek oral culture (in contrast to the modern world that has replaced the ear with an eye, says Marshall Mc-Luhan). This means that this sort of vision includes relationality, recep-34 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science,
transl. Paul Davies (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 30.
35 I am consulting Henry R. Stapp, Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the
Participating Observer, 2nd edition (Heidelberg: Springer, 2011), 2.
36 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heraclitus Studies”, in: Gadamer, The Beginning
of Knowledge, 14.
37 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 104, Note 174.
38 Georg Gadamer, “On the Divine in Early Greek Thought”, in:
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutics, Religion and Ethics, transl. Joel Weinscheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 43.
tivity, and emotional responses. The auditory relation is the linguistic aspect of being-with-one-another and is thus comparable to feeling-re-sponse in comprehensive observation.
There is thus a way of being-in-the-world about which the early Greeks and Chinese philosophers were aware to which quantum me-chanics points the way, i.e., understanding of the self-in-nature. Howev-er, that is not to say that the Newtonian-Cartesian perspective or mode of perception ought to be abandoned. For Gadamer, Newtonian and Kantian categories are still relevant. For starters, they continue to accu-rately describe the macroscale of reality or familiar things of common sense. Those categories, e.g., of cause and effect, continue to make sense of experiments and results. They ought not to be abandoned simply be-cause the ionic microscale of the same reality has been discovered within the possibilities afforded by our instruments of measurement. Since con-sciousness is affected by history, language bears the imprint of the past, which is classical mechanics. Hence, Gadamer does not relinquish the instrumental use of language. Indeed, the separation of knower from known primes us to embrace the emergent nature of things no less than the separation of Being from beings enables the mother of all becoming, Plato’s Receptacle. Distance draws near and this is a catalyst for change. Accordingly, the Newtonian-Kantian categories and language we use to understand the world will be modified by being re-interpreted from the mode of perception in synchronicity with the early Greeks and Hera-clitos who understood that fire steers all. The important qualification is that the medium for the transmission of fire or electrodynamic impulses is a wave, which might introduce another orientation into the puzzle.39
There are thus affinities between Cheng and Gadamer the Pythag-orean-Platonist as regards their theories of Being and human existence. Gadamer writes of Plato, “He sought to reveal the interweaving con-nections which bind the spheres of soul, the city state and the universe as a whole.”40 Just as harmony resounds in Gadamer’s account of ethics
(Philebus), aesthetics (Phaedrus), politics (Republic) and cosmology
(Ti-maeus) so too does the theme of harmony recur in Neo-Confucianism.
For the latter, the universe is a dynamic process that generates harmony in which living creatures, family, state, and society are enveloped. Hu-man existence does not, however, stand apart from these realms. On
39 Indeed, this modification of Newtonian-Kantian categories is already
under-way due to the influence of the computer on the mind. Causal, syllogistic, linear, sequential reasoning typical of what McLuhan dubs the Gutenberg era is currently being displaced by lateral thinking, correlations, pattern recognition, and analogy.
40 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Between Nature and Art”, in: Hans-Georg Gadamer,
The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age, transl. Jason Gaiger and
the contrary, for both Cheng and Gadamer the self is a medium within the tension filled electro-dynamic field formed by oppositions of Be-ing and becomBe-ing, subject and object. For this very reason, Gadamer cannot avoid the demand heard also by Cheng to resolve differences in creative acts of interpretation and thereby remake history in the im-age of eternity.41
III. Gadamer’s Dialectic
Both Cheng and Gadamer aim to overcome “Cartesianism” from within and out of the tension in existence created by binary oppositions such as that between One and many.42 This is expressed by Gadamer as follows:
“Someone understands what cognition, knowing, insight is only when he also understands how it can be that one and one are two and how the two is one.”43 It is not clear that the American continental philosophers,
philosophers who eschew metaphysics and view him as a post-meta-physical thinker, measure up to this rendition of cognition where know-ing and insight repeat in a different register the Neo-Confucian dialectic of harmonization. In fact, while Daniel Tate and James Risser recognize the significance of Plato’s dialectic to hermeneutics, they also overlook “how” one and one is two and two is one. As a result, they overstep the middle in which to creatively harmonize contraries and interpret the dialectic from one of two sides (ultimately dispositions), which is reduc-tionist and renews the subject-object dichotomy. This attests to the limits of the western mind, or the extent to which it is influenced by the logic of non-contradiction. Tracking that influence in their interpretations clarifies Gadamer’s philosophy and its affinities with Cheng’s onto-gen-erative hermeneutics.
In “Renewing the Question of Beauty: Gadamer on Plato’s Idea of the Beautiful” (2015) Tate applies Gadamer’s Platonic ontology to aesthet-ics on the basis of three dialogues that he maps onto three dimensions of the beautiful; Phaedrus-radiance, Symposium-transcendence, Philebus-measure. By tracing out the structural features of beauty in these works
41 Historical consciousness is a falling away from the origins Gadamer discerns
in Aristotle. “For him the moral and historical life of mankind remains related to the order represented pre-eminently by the cosmos. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 521.
42 The transformation into structure presupposes aesthetic consciousness while
also neutralizing it in a different attitude toward language.
43 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Plato’s Unwritten Dialectic”, in: Hans-Georg
Gadam-er, Dialogue and Dialectic, 135. See also, ibidem, 94 where through the voice of Plato Gadamer poses the problem of thinking in opposites while and differentiating con-cepts.
he aims to reposition aesthetics in relation to truth,44 i.e., he undertakes
to enact Dawson’s theory about the significance of Plato’s ontology to understanding Gadamer’s theory of art and history. Tate writes, “By re-turning to Plato Gadamer intends to recover an ontological understand-ing of the beautiful that remembers its original union with both beunderstand-ing and the true.”45 The basis for the union of being, beauty and truth is
that they exhibit dialectic of the one and the many. However, there is evidence that while Tate acknowledges their interplay, he also misinter-prets it. For example, he acknowledges the distinction and separation of the one from the many, writing “the beautiful is always co-present in those beautiful things from which it must be distinguished, but never separated”46 and; “The idea of the beautiful is a different kind of one
than the other ideas.”47 In this case, he is giving voice to Gadamer’s
posi-tion. After asking whether Plato replaces the separation hypothesis with participation Gadamer asks, “Or do both postulations belong together: the ideas being for themselves, the so-called chorismos (separation), and the difficulty, to which one is thereby exposed, concerning participation, or methexis, as it is called? Could it be that chorismos and methexis go together even from the start?”48 The conditions are in place with which
to account for the merging of opposites that retain their distinctiveness from one another.
However, rather than retain the separation thesis, Tate effaces the distinction between separation and participation. After citing the
Sympo-sium and arguing that beauty transcends laws, bodies, poetry and so on,
yet is present in them (with the support of Drew Hylund) he asserts that “this does not mean that beauty is a changeless object of noetic vision.”49
It does not occur to Tate how beauty might be both an unchanging ob-ject of intellection as well as manifest in phenomenon. Correlatively, he effaces the ontological difference by construing truth solely in terms of appearances, i.e., appearing-non-appearing. While this is consistent with Heidegger’s concept of truth as aletheia it is inconsistent with both the representational function of language and related correspondence theory of truth that stands in a constructive relationship with “partici-pation” for both Gadamer and Plato. Along the same lines, Tate con-44 Daniel L. Tate, “Renewing the Question of Beauty: Gadamer on Plato’s Idea
of the Beautiful”, Epoché 20/1 (Fall 2015): 22.
45 Ibidem, 22. 46 Ibidem, 28.
47 Tate, “Renewing the Question of Beauty”: 28. See also Tate, “Erotics of
Herme-neutics: Nehamas and Gadamer, Beauty and Art”, Journal of Aesthetics and
Phenom-enology 2/1 (2015): 17.
48 Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, transl. P.
Chris-topher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 9–10, 115–116.
cludes that “‘the good,’ which is at the same time ‘the beautiful,’ does not exist somewhere apart for itself and in itself, somewhere ‘beyond.’ Instead it exists in everything that we recognize as a beautiful mixture.”50
In short, Tate exhibits reticence toward the way in which the noetic vision of beauty as a changeless object stands in a mutually supportive relation to many things that manifest Beauty. This suggests that he abandons the middle and interprets one side of the dialectic in terms of the other.
Risser’s interpretation of Gadamer is multifaceted. The subsequent section develops aspects of his research that contribute to a Confucian-Gadamer rapprochement that reconfigures Western metaphysics and self-understanding. At this point, elements that stand in the way of the latter are emphasized. In The Life of Understanding and an earlier essay, “Gadamer’s Plato and the Task of Philosophy,”51 Risser consults Plato’s
image of weaving in the Statesman for an explanation about “how to re-veal, in speech, things as they are.”52 The first kind of measure is
Py-thagorean and fit for theoretical studies.53 He concludes that this kind
of measurement has no relation to praxis or virtue, which the second kind does. In contrast to theoretical studies, practical arts such as states-manship have an end in view and are thus fitted to ethical life.
At first glance this seems about right. A theoretically exact science cannot be a measure by which to reveal things as they are because it is “against life.” This is consistent with Gadamer’s line of reasoning in “the hermeneutical relevance of Aristotle.”54 In keeping with the
lat-ter, P. Christopher Smith is emphatic about distinguishing Gadamer’s hermeneutic approach from a “logical-methodological approach” to interpretation,55 because the former includes context and the latter does
not. Risser’s reading of the weave in the Statesman being a metaphor for 50 Ibidem, 33.
51 James Risser, The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics
(Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press, 2012). Risser, “Gadamer’s Plato and the Task of Phi-losophy”, in: Gadamer verstehen/ Understanding Gadamer, ed. Mirko Wischke and Mi-chael Hofer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003).
52 “Clearly, we should divide the art of measurement into two on the principle
enunciated by dividing it at this point. One section will comprise all arts of measuring number, length, depth and breadth, or velocity of objects by relative standards. The other section comprises arts concerned with due measure, due occasion, due time, due performance, and all such standards as have removed their abode from the ex-tremes and are now settled about the mean” (Statesman, 284e). See also Gadamer’s interpretation of the imagery of the weave, “The Artwork in Word and Image”, in: Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, ed. Richard Palmer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 205–206.
53 See Risser, “Gadamer’s Plato and the Task of Philosophy”, 71. 54 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 309.
55 P. Christopher Smith, “H.G. Gadamer’s Heideggerian Interpretation of Plato”,
dialectical thinking agrees with Gadamer’s explanation of the herme-neutical relevance of Aristotle in Truth and Method, and Smith’s over-all assessment of Gadamer’s approach to hermeneutics. For this reason, it makes sense to separate the two kinds of measure from one another and allot the art of weaving to the second kind of measure alone.
Nevertheless, there are two reasons to question Risser’s decision about the insignificance of the mathematically exact sciences to ruling. The first pertains to the credibility of the speaker in Plato’s dialogue, and the second to the consequences of Risser’s thesis for discourse. Stanley Rosen, whom Risser cites in support of his interpretation of the
States-man, writes of that dialogue:
There can be no doubt that the late dialogues of Plato are more difficult in content and style than their predecessors. The displacement of Socrates from his role as principal interlocutor by a series of strangers from Elea, Locri, and Athens, respectively, is accompanied by an increased ponder-ousness of language, greater proliferation of technical detail, and the con-sequent diminution of the erotic playfulness and Attic urbanity that mark the earlier dialogues. The initial predominance of sunlight and lucidity, even in the conversations that take place at night such as the Symposium and Republic, and notwithstanding the continuous irony of the main speaker, is replaced by chiaroscuro and baroque ornamentation on the one hand and the substitution of professorial discourse for dramatic dia-logue on the other.56
For Gadamer, works that grow out of the inner state of the soul in logos (ratio) are playful, jocular and replete with irony. Thrasymachus is a tight-wound drum in the Republic, Protagoras over-confident and full of himself in the dialogue that bears his name. The Eleatic Stranger in the Statesman is a bore. His thinking is not imbued with the substance of his character, which is in keeping with his apolitical field of exper-tise. Indeed, the aptly named anonymous Stranger is the problem for hermeneutics because he disregards himself from a situation over which he purports to preside as judge. Rosen thus points out that the late dia-logues, especially the Statesman, are intended to demonstrate “the inap-propriateness of diaeresis to the study of human affairs,”57 that there is
no extended example of how to employ dialectic in that dialogue,58 and
that the speakers classify human beings with pigs, which he says is as an example of theoretical madness.59 The only time eros is mentioned
56 Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Statesman: The Web of Politics (New Haven: Yale
Univer-sity Press, 1995), 1.
57 Ibidem, 2. 58 Ibidem, 3. 59 Ibidem, 10.
(307e6), the Stranger asserts that it is inappropriate for a peaceful na-ture.60 The upshot is that the speech Risser relies on to understand the
weave is spoken by someone who is not themselves, i.e., the anonymous, faceless Stranger who cannot for that reason be relied upon to give a full account of how the Pythagorean theoretical numbers are woven into the art of ruling.
The consequence of denying the importance of mathematics to ruling is on a continuum with the consequences for discourse. Risser attributes to Gadamer the belief that “discourse is structurally incapable of coming to unity.” He explains, “every speaking subjects what it speaks about to determination, to an ‘as-what,’ which is never identical to the thing spo-ken about, and this means that speaking takes up its object of concern through an already [italics mine] constituted division within interpreta-tion that cannot be made whole.”61 What is this already constituted
divi-sion within interpretation? It refers to the subject-matter slipping away whenever we speak about it. This is not necessarily the case if the unity toward which speakers strive is a possibility they remember. In order for this to hold, the unity or end must be distinguished from propositions or the ontic surface of beings by interpreting them from the side of “listen-ing consciousness” that Walter Brogan indicates when he argues for the unitary effect of resonance.62 From that stance, unity is a possibility
rec-ollected in the course of speaking about something. When Risser states that dialectic is structurally incapable of coming to unity, he is effectively equating this prior unity with the realm of what can be divided, which is why he says that the latter is “already.” That is to say, he takes an already constituted division within interpretation as primary rather than being a facet of a prior and ontologically distinct ground that makes division possible in the first place. Consequently, he reasons above that inter-pretation cannot be made whole. This may well be, but dropping the language of part and whole does not mean that they are not constitutive of language and, instead, might well indicate that “the whole” is a whole of meaning intelligible to another than visual standpoint. On account then of presupposing that the whole must be a form seen, he is inclined to run what is in fact the ontologically prior one together with the ontic surface of many beings, and on that basis interpret any pretense toward
60 Ibidem, 3–4.
61 Risser, The Life of Understanding, 22.
62 Unpublished lecture. Walter Brogan, “Basic Concepts of Hermeneutics:
Ga-damer on Tradition and Community”, NASPH Conference, Goucher College (Balti-more, Maryland, U.S. September 14–17, 2017), 2.
knowledge of the whole to be comparable to the closure represented by Hegel’s absolute against which he defines his own position.63
This selective sample of American continental Gadamer scholarship suggests that the western philosophers are reluctant to think in the mid-dle of things or between opposing forces. Even in the midst of arguing for a dialectical understanding of Being, they privilege one pole of the di-alectic, and thereby re-enact the objectification of the “other” by a subject that stands over and against an object. Tate’s interpretation of Gadamer’s Platonic dialectical ontology of the One and the many exaggerates “par-ticipation” to the point of eclipsing the grounds for “separation” of op-posites. Risser denies the relevance of a metaphysics of transcendence in Gadamer’s thought, i.e., separation, and is thereby inclined to confuse a vision of the whole with a part. Neither Tate nor Risser’s interpretations of Gadamer align with a dialectical interplay of opposites and this is due to a reluctance to dwell in the quintessential middle. This is clear when Risser reasons as follows: “To be in the middle of things is to be caught up in the weakness of the logos.”64 For Risser, logos is weak because we
cannot grasp the meaning we are after. In order therefore to affect the “force of intelligibility” that generates discourse it is best to avoid the “middle of things,” i.e., refrain from thinking opposites together (unity) and prioritize one side of the dialectic alone. This argument could be ex-tended to Antoine Pageau-St-Hilaire who reasons that in contrast to Leo Strauss, since the theoretical life is bounded or limited by the political for Gadamer, Gadamer must therefore hold that philosophy cannot be-come unpolitical.65 Not unlike Tate and Risser, Pageau-St-Hilaire might
not recognize how Gadamer’s philosophy is grounded within both the political and non-political realms or how both and neither one are true.
In order to revitalize the ontological structure of Gadamer’s herme-neutics it is fitting to re-visit Plato’s weave and explain out how to weave the first kind of measure in the Statesman, the theoretical-Pythagorean mathematical measure into the art of ruling. Gadamer urges just this 63 To be clear, the explanation for Risser’s unqualified denial of unity of the
un-derstanding in discourse is the tendency to privilege one side of the dialectic over the other. However, in contrast to Brogan and Tate whose dominant mode of reasoning is one of tarrying, withing, whiling, dwelling “letting be,” participation and com-mensurate with them fluidity between individuals and others, Risser asserts a visual mode of cognition from the outset. The belief that knowledge is acquired by sight alone mistakes impressions-seen with meaning-heard and thereby denies the unitary effect of a dialogue. Stated differently, as a result of mistaking the meaning of Being for beings and thereby denying the possibility of hearkening to a prior sense of unity in the course of a conversation, Risser insists that we can only grasp aspects of an idea or whole of meaning.
64 Risser, The Life of Understanding, 92.
65 Antoine Pageau-St-Hilaire, “Philosophy and Politics in Gadamer’s
undertaking several times.66 It will be addressed in the next section.
Suf-fice it to say that orienting one’s life by Tao requires precisely what West-ern thinkers repeatedly overstep; namely, a capacity to live in relation to the harmony of all things, i.e., the spatial middle, the qualitative mean or lingual medium.67 When Gadamer claims that the task for
philoso-phy is to both remove and think a contradiction he presupposes just this very idea – that understanding dwells in the middle between contesting forces in language. Thus understood, Gadamer is closer to Cheng’s un-derstanding of onto-generative hermeneutics than he is to western ac-counts of his thought.
IV. Onto-Dialogical Hermeneutics: Ethos
Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics stands behind this elaboration of Gadamer’s dialectic of harmonization and an understanding of the self that extends into both history and nature. Without Cheng’s insights into the practical implications of the Yijing’s open cosmology for western thought, the significance of Gadamer’s Pythagorean-Platonic ontology for human practice would be difficult to ascertain. Gadamer is cryptic about it. For example, he explains that the “fitting” in the Statesman re-fers to the “mixture” of the limited and unlimited in the Philebus because both concern “the middle between the extremes.” At this point, he re-fers to Aristotle’s ethics, which is the locus for the mixture. At the same time, Gadamer asserts that the “political-utopian and cosmic-universal” (about which Aristotle is silent) stand behind ethos.68 The
political-utopi-an refers to the Republic political-utopi-and the cosmic-universal to the Timaeus. Both the ideal state and Plato’s cosmology stand behind the mixture of the limited and unlimited in the ethics of the Philebus. There is then a kind of ethos prior to harmonization of the political with the cosmological scale of re-ality exemplified in the art of weaving Heaven and Earth together. Over-looking this ethos prefigured in the early Greek cult experience of the di-66 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Classical and Philosophical Hermeneutics”, in:
Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Gadamer Reader, 66; Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Proofs of Immortality in Plato’s Phaedo”, in: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic, 23; Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, 172. See also, Gadamer, “Plato’s Unwritten Dialectic”, in: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and
Dialectic, 135.
67 I am consulting Cheng, “Onto-Hermeneutical Vision and the Analytic
Dis-course”, 135 on the notions of a spatial and qualitative middle. For Gadamer, the turn to language for interpretation involves understanding in the middle as a medium in which understanding and the senses are re-oriented toward a temporal rather than spatial horizon of meaning, which in turn entails re-ordering of spatial relations.
vine seems to be typical of Western thought were it not for paths charted by Grondin, Risser, Wierciński and Lammi that are oriented toward rec-ollecting a pre-historical sense of rhythm – the very rhythm or shaking movement that makes the right mixture in the Philebus possible.
In “Nihilistic or Metaphysical Consequences of Hermeneutics,” 69
Grondin’s project to recover metaphysics with hermeneutics starts with an analysis of “an experience of truth” that includes two prongs. He thus reiterates at another level of analysis than Beauty (Tate) or Plato’s weave (Risser), that all things strive for harmony. On the one hand, contra the conviction that prejudices disable truth as correspondence, Grondin locates truth in an anticipation/projection of historical consciousness that is “controlled” by the thing itself and thereby corroborated or falsi-fied. This is how he makes sense of a “bad” or “good” prejudice. On the other hand, contra Gadamer’s alleged historicism, Grondin explains that the truth of things corresponds to something “like a timeless truth.” His example is the non-historically relative essence (as he claims) of Pi-casso’s Guernica. According to Grondin, it exemplifies the “new defini-tion of the classical.” Taken together, truth thus resides in both the fore-structure of understanding and things themselves. When the two sides fit together forming a unity of thought and Being, a “truth experience” transpires that Grondin recognizes in Greek metaphysics. He concludes his article by quoting Gadamer that hermeneutics “leads us back, if we want to conform to the thing itself, in the dimension of problems of clas-sical metaphysics.”
Grondin’s account of a “truth experience” for Gadamer intersects with the conviction that understanding in language is formed by both history and Being. Importantly, a turn toward language as the medium for understanding entangles human understanding in principles that pull in different directions – futurity of projection in a phenomenological horizon of time (history) and things that announce themselves (in lan-guage) from the side of emergent nature/life. However, even though he refers the reader to Gadamer’s last book Hermeneutische Entwürfe (2000) for guidelines about how the experience of art transcends history, it is not clear to Grondin how the fore-structure of understanding or antici-pation is transformed when it is “controlled” by the essence of things. To answer this question, it is best to turn to Gadamer’s commentary on Plato’s Timaeus.
The demiurge in the Timaeus does not “make” or “work” to reveal the inner law of necessity. Instead, the demiurge envisions the perfect 69 Jean Grondin, “Nihilistic or Metaphysical Consequences of Hermeneutics?”,
in: Consequences of Hermeneutics: Fifty Years After Gadamer’s Truth and Method, ed. Jeff Malpas and Santiago Zabala (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 190– 201.
proportion of the heavens (constancy of beauty) in phenomena that im-age it,70 which I would liken to the ideal form of things in phenomenon
that Paul Friedländer attributes to Plato’s “theory of ideas.” On account of this “aesthetic vision,” “intuitive form of unity” or comprehensive observation of the whole in a part, the demiurge is compared to a nurse or midwife who through the relational power of language (being-with-one-another) accommodates the other for their own sake, or as other. Gadamer highlights that in the Timaeus this accommodation appears to us as charm and persuasion. In the living language this charm is audible in rhythm, resonance and vibration between speakers’ voices and enliv-ens their minds to think by following the topic-question at hand (tact or groping effect). In a nutshell, when Grondin mentions a return via antici-pation he intuits the recollection of an origin, which then becomes (from the side of a “listening” rather than “reading consciousness”) the begin-ning for re-interpreting the given topic. Anticipation within history that recalls this trans-historical unity of Being and thought signals a change in human ethos that enables a re-interpretation of beings in terms of Be-ing, i.e., in terms of proportions that appear to us in the temporal flow of language that has a share in the moving order of organisms (self-un-folding number).
In “Gadamer’s Hidden Doctrine,” Risser builds on Grondin’s defer-ring to Greek metaphysics for understanding the unity of thought and Being.71 In the course of explaining “the sudden” or event of
under-standing as the transformation of One into many and many into one, Risser consults Heraclitos on the passage of day into night, on the peri-odic cycles of nature that are self-unfolding from out of the very tension or difference between them. This is effectively the move that positions language in nature, i.e., the belonging implied in hearing,72 above all
through the back and forth movement of a dialogue self-similar to the rhythms of nature. Through this side of language, the nature of things announces itself in history to us as the language of things. Stated dif-ferently and in the words of Mircea Eliade, the hermeneut “reproduces on the human scale the system of rhythmic and reciprocal conditioning influences that characterizes and constitutes a world that, in short, de-fines any universe.”73 The task of hermeneutics is comparable to what
Plato’s demiurge accomplishes (transformation of disorder into order 70 I am consulting Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Idea and Reality in Plato’s Timaeus”,
in: Hans-George Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic, 156–193.
71 James Risser, “Gadamer’s Hidden Doctrine: On the Simplicity and Humility
of Philosophy”, in: Consequences of Hermeneutics, 5–24.
72 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 478.
73 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, transl. Willard
from within and out of chaos). Having said that, Risser blurs the distinc-tion between belonging to history and belonging to nature by reassert-ing the primacy of the former. As a result, the source of immortality, the infinite unsaid, is never clarified. Rather than recognize that the rhythm of language is ontologically distinct from the influence of history, he as-serts that the event of Being does not dissolve difference, identity always includes otherness, that we cannot transcend finite possibilities of un-derstanding. He restricts the “interplay” of past and present to the phe-nomenological horizon of time. Would he but shed the historicity theme, and recognize the significance of a descent along a vertical axis advo-cated by Grondin, Risser might well come to terms with the ontological dimension he taps into with his analysis of “the sudden” by way of the rhythms of nature in Heraclitos.
That toward which Risser is reticent, is embraced by Lammi. He ar-gues that Gadamer’s recovery of the event of understanding is inspired by Walter Otto and “the German-Hungarian” Karl Kerényi’s (among others) account of the Greek cult experience of the divine.74 According
to Lammi, recollection is not simply a cognitive act of remembering what we know but includes the slipping away of ordinary consciousness and rebirth through proper motion, song and dance into an elevated com-munion with all beings. This experience of truth as Grondin calls it, is an image (or referred to by) Plato’s arithmos paradigm. Granted, Lammi does not attend sufficiently to mathematical proportions as a paradig-matic model of the cosmos ascertained by Tate in Gadamer’s aesthetics. However, if “polemics always presupposes something in common,”75
then Lammi’s interpretation includes what it “forgets.” The same could be said of Wierciński and his focus on Christian theology.
Wierciński anchors Gadamer’s hermeneutics in the Christian doc-trine of the incarnation, Word made Flesh in the Gospel of John and Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity. This seems justified. Gadamer ex-plains in Truth and Method, “Language and Verbum” that in contrast to Plato who separates thought from language, the Incarnation shows how thought comes to language. This does not, however, overturn the portrait of Plato the Pythagorean advanced in this paper. P. Christopher Smith argues that, at the time of writing Truth and Method, Gadamer’s view of Plato was overly determined by Heidegger.76 But Gadamer leads
us to believe otherwise. He asserts, “This structure of the logos and the
verbum, as recognized by Platonic and Augustinian dialectic, is simply
74 Lammi, Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, 28. See Gadamer, Truth and
Method, 117.
75 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 104, Note 174.
the reflection of its logical contents.”77 In this case, Plato’s negation of the
living language (with the theory of ideas) stands in a positive relation-ship to its affirmation in the same way that Plato’s late dialogues on dialectic of ideas, e.g. Parmenides, stand in a positive relationship to the early dialogues on the life of Socrates. Plato and Christianity although opposites also complement one another and hence, Gadamer locates the Pythagorean and Platonic concept of measure in Christian moral phi-losophy.78 The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is radical departure
from Greek thought, but at the same time Christian moral philosophy is prefigured in Plato’s mixture of limited and unlimited. The salient point is concisely stated by Kenneth Dorter while trying to reconcile Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus with Zhu Xi: “in order to combine different phi-losophies, a synthesis has to leave aside the incompatible elements that distinguish them from one another, so a synthesis involves rejection as well as inclusion.”79
By relying solely on the Word of God to interpret the warp and woof of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Wierciński overlooks the other prong of Gadamer’s dialectic, manifest in the order of nature that animates the interpretation of a tradition handed down in writing. Nevertheless, Wierciński’s manner of reasoning also attests to this argument in a posi-tive way. He makes statements that acknowledge both the metaphysical and historical dimensions of language. He writes, “For Gadamer, the universality of hermeneutics is grounded in historical consciousness, in language, historicity, and the understanding of philosophy as herme-neutics. The universality of hermeneutics is the universality of a lingual-ly mediated experience, the ontological disclosure of Being.”80 Whence
the universality and the ontological disclosure of Being? In “The Lan-guage of Metaphysics” Gadamer challenges Heidegger’s sense of the self as coming to presence and self-preserving.81 This is one sense of the
self that runs alongside and thus is transformed by Gadamer when he writes, it is senseless to pit ourselves against nature.82 Rather than assert
77 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 474.
78 Ibidem, 37. Plato’s numerological metaphysics is a formalization of the Word
made Flesh. Logos-mythos, true science and “the gift of the gods”/divine dispensa-tion narrative.
79 Dorter, Kenneth, “Metaphysics and Morality in Neo-Confucianism and Greece:
Zhu Xi, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus”, Dao 8/3 (2009): 256.
80 Andrzej Wierciński, Existentia Hermeneutica: Understanding as the Mode of Being
in the World (LIT Verlag GmbH & Co. KG Wien, Zweigniederlassung Zürich: 2019),
10.
81 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Language of Metaphysics”, in: Hans-Georg
Ga-damer, Heidegger’s Ways, transl. John W. Stanley (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), 77.
ourselves out of the circuit of life (like a god) as he says of Heidegger, Gadamer aims to step into the circuit of life and, like any living organ-ism, e.g., vegetable, to secure and persist in that infinite cycle/Being. The return to the early Greek experience of the fundamental character of the world depends on us, on our capacity to reverse metaphysical subjectiv-ism and reinterpret it from the side of life, the “metaphysical-aesthetic point of view.”83 Wierciński alludes to this when he refers to the original
language of concealed possibilities, to keeping watch over releasing in-ner forces that make the event of understanding possible84 and; when
he argues that hermeneutics mediates between the finite and the infi-nite, between the human and the divine.85 In both cases, he is thinking
from the side of language that has a share in the rhythm and reciprocity of nature and that compels a reinterpretation of beings in history. We are being-in-nature and history. The movement between them ensures foundations without foundationalism. Without God or any other reli-gious doctrine.
V. Conclusion
Gadamer scholarship is varied and diverse, but also exhibits a tenden-cy toward one position or another. Tate sides with participation of One in many rather than their separation and Risser sides with separation (separates metaphysics from life) rather than with participation or weav-ing of the Pythagorean number doctrine into practical philosophy. Gron-din discerns the trans-historical grounds of hermeneutics in the essence of truth yet leaves aside how a transformation in ethos through recol-lection enables a truth experience. Wierciński grasps the unity of one and many in terms of a Christian doctrine without due regard to how Gadamer’s dialectic explains his way of organizing the history of phi-losophy and in particular the relation of the Greeks to theology. There is a tendency toward positions that overlooks, tacitly or explicitly denies conditions that contradict an interpretation even though that is precisely what Gadamer expects. For him, contradiction is the inner life of the real because we are beings-in-nature within history. The effects of the 17th
century science on our consciousness have resulted in a neglect of nature,
83 Martin Heidegger, “Language in the Poem”, in: Martin Heidegger, On the Way
to Language, transl. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971), 160.
84 Wierciński, Existentia Hermeneutica, 8. 85 Ibidem, 63.
which is why Lammi reminds us that Gadamer identified his own pro-ject with Platonic recollection.86
Whereas, in Being and Time, Heidegger abandons the question of how to bring the concept of life back into biology, Gadamer contin-ues the qcontin-uest, although in terms of a concept of nature in which human beings participate through the dialectical structure of language. I have credited Plato with the inspiration for this move. To limit the thought to Gadamer’s Pythagorean Plato in the Sophist 242c, the early Greeks cult experience of the divine, or Heraclitos would be narrow-minded. After recalling that confidence in science had been shattered after World War I, Gadamer writes, “In this situation it is hardly surprising that a com-pletely second-rate book of the times had a truly profound effect on me: Theodore Lessing’s Europe and Asia (1926) book, based on the wisdom of the East, put the totality of European accomplishment-oriented think-ing in question.”87 He then notes that Lessing was assassinated by
Ger-man nationalists. Could Gadamer have resumed the arc of Lessing’s idea to save the west from itself? i.e., from the destructive consequences of mechanization for nature. In “From Word to Concept,” he refers to the destiny of humanity hanging in the balance, predicts a fusing of East-ern and WestEast-ern cultures,88 and highlights the influx of Asian students
into American universities and who are not giving up their own “inher-ited ways of life and religious beliefs.”89 He considers it philosophically
worthwhile to mention that the order of the family in China survived the best efforts of the Communists to destroy it.90 Gadamer is not a
Neo-Confucian. Nevertheless, he may well have recognized in classical Chi-nese philosophy his own interpretation of Plato’s ontology and its im-plications for transforming western self-understanding. That is to say, a Platonic-Pythagorean ontology that is prefigured in the pre-Socratics such as in Anaximander’s paying penance to one another that Gadamer indicates is in accordance with “the Asiatic model.”91
Just as Cheng re-iterates Mencius and situates the person within the nexus of mutually contrasting and complementary principles/forces 86 Walter Lammi, Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Note 130, 149. Citing
Gadamer, “Destruktion and Deconstruction”, in: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and
Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, transl. Diane P. Michelfelder, Richard
E. Palmer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 110.
87 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Autobiographical Reflections”, in: Hans-Georg
Ga-damer, The Gadamer Reader, 6.
88 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “From Word to Concept”, in: Hans-Georg Gadamer,
The Gadamer Reader, 111.
89 Ibidem, 118. 90 Ibidem, 119.
91 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Natural Science and the Concept of Nature”, in:
that unify the human with the Tao,92 so too does Gadamer position
un-derstanding in the middle of language; specifically, in the intermediary realm of rhythm between self and world. Vincent Shen conveys the reso-nance between humanity and a dynamic ontology of natural principles with Zhuangzi’s example of the Butcher Ding. The play of his knife is similar to the rhythms and keeping time “to the Ching-shou music.” The butcher is an artist who follows and is thereby perfected by nature’s rhythms that animate all things. Freedom arises within the intervals of the dance.93 The butcher’s experience of his art could be compared to
Gadamer’s ontology of play. In either case, understanding is centered in neither the subjectivity of the subject nor in the world but in both, in order to bring about a unitary effect through the to and fro move-ments that are self-similar to the movement between day and night, male and female, Heaven and Earth, yin and yang. The dialectic of harmoni-zation that Cheng discerns in classical Chinese philosophy is affirmed rather than derailed by Gadamer’s turn to language. Language, or rather a dialogue that forges friendship, fellowship in human solidarity reflects the order of things. While Gadamer is aware of how the phonetic alpha-bet, abstract nouns, and neuter in western languages are responsible for the separation of thought from Being that distinguishes Indo-European from Chinese classical philosophy, he is also keen about the opposite. He explains, “In my Platos dialektishe Ethic I worked out to what extent this investigation of reality as it is present in the logos provides access to the truth about what is, and how it serves in uncovering the true order of the cosmos.”94 It is not clear just how reality, in the sense of a
dia-lectic of harmonization, is present in the logos. He explains that pho-nemes hold everything together that consonants separate and that this illustrates “the transposition of the Pythagorean idea of harmony to the sphere of logos.”95 Presumably, the separation makes possible the
hold-ing together such that they are mutually supporthold-ing in the generation of meaning. Therefore, Gadamer gives priority to the spoken language, to conversation in his interpretation of a written text. The inner ear dis-cerns unity within opposed elements.96
92 Cheng, “Towards Constructing a Dialectics of Harmonization”: 29–30. 93 Vincent Shen, “Metaphors, Narratives, and Existence”, in: The Imperative of
Un-derstanding: Chinese Philosophy, Comparative Philosophy, and Onto-Generative Hermeneu-tics, ed. On-cho Ng (New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2008), 53–54.
94 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Amicus Plato Magis Amica Veritas”, in: Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic, 198. This also shifts the discussion of unity of logos from rhythm to tone of voice or state of mind.
95 Ibidem, 204.
96 I am referring to Logos as a gathering that composes opposed elements into one
